Forum:Clutter on wanted pages
For some time now (ages!), the have been littered with oodles of starship & class names which seem unlikely to ever be turned into articles. Unfortunately, that's the problem when folks create all kinds of such links, usually on templates, then never create the articles. To wit:'' USS Potedaia is currently at the top of the list, with 200 links''. Has anyone else heard of'' Potedaia''? I haven't. That even outranks'' Akyazi subclass (currently 95 links), of which I've seen many more mentions across the fan spectrum. And every time somone gets around to clearing one off the top of the list, the next automatically takes its place... and it's never-ending. I don't doubt the existence of those various ships, classes, marine strike groups, task forces, starbases & whatnot, in whatever fan sources they came from, but without that information handy to anyone other than the person(s) who created those links, and without time to do extensive web-searches (assuming such info can be found on the internet), it's difficult for anyone other than the person(s) to create the articles. I've been contemplating how to clean it up, in order to get them off there, allowing other unwritten articles of probably more general interest to the ST fan community to move up & take precedence, like fan-film actors & so on. But, I'm not sure what's the best route/plan of action, short of removing those links from the templates... which seems the only way to go, yet might be inadvisable for the reason cited above. So: Does anyone have any ideas? Please share them here. If after a period, say a week or two, there's no consensus on an alternative method, or the majority doesn't feel we should leave it as-is, I motion to remove the red-links from those templates. They can easily be reinserted when & if someone decides to write the articles, which is how it should have been done in the first place. If no clear majority opposes this, I'll start removing them, and/or can do so. At the same time, a policy might be in order for dealing with this type of situation in the future, so that this doesn't keep happening. What do y'all think? 03:59, 28 October 2008 (UTC) :How about creating a generic placeholder page, and redirecting links like USS Potedaia to it. I looked through the "what links here" page for that redlink, and only pages which bear the template link to it. For wanted articles like that - where no other data can be found to create even a stub - a generic placeholder that says something like "if you have any information regarding this starship, please edit this article" might be a good idea. :My guess is since Captainmike added it and a lot of these other ships to the templates, that it's from some obscure print source that isn't readily available online. That's just a guess, we can ask him. --TimPendragon 05:00, 28 October 2008 (UTC) ::That's an excellent idea... and the most easily accomplished, like on the Trekmania page. That way we don't have to actually delete anything... which, personally, I never like doing anyway. 05:08, 28 October 2008 (UTC) :::Guess wrong -- RahadyanS added Potedaia on February 16, to the Constitution class template -- so its linked from all 200 Constitution articles. :::As to the Akyazi, I'd hardly call Ships of the Star Fleet vol2 obscure, anyone who is contributing to that one could easily find that book in print or in PDF. -- Captain MKB 10:14, 28 October 2008 (UTC) ::::Yeah, I know the ''Akyazi comes from SotF, wasn't worried about that. I was talking mainly about the unwritten Constitution articles. --TimPendragon 17:22, 28 October 2008 (UTC) ::Does anyone even hear from Rahadyan anymore, or know if he's still alive? He was off to such an avid start, then just disappeared. I've tried contacting him but got no response. Seems like I saw activity from him after he vanished from STEU, somewhere on the net... Fanfiction.net maybe; can't remember... a few months ago. Not sure. 22:12, 29 October 2008 (UTC) :I think we should get some sort of "weighing" system going on, whereas these ship articles are somehow bumped lower in the queue. Potedaia was the bane of one of my internet searches a few weeks back, as no information exists on it (even the name seems not to exist), and so I can understand the frustration. :Is there any way to alter the "wanted list" so those wanted articles only linked to through a template have lower relevance? Could that be an option? (Or is this too hard?) : and I (and others, I'm sorry I'm not sure exactly who but I'm sure we're not the only two) have been trawling through and trying to add some of the ships, but it is a daunting task, especially when there are so many other more-valuable articles out there to be created. :The alternative I would think would be okay would be the generic placeholder page, but it depends on what exactly is involved. That's my 2 cents' worth! --usscantabrian 00:28, 1 November 2008 (UTC) Bringing it back up Thought I'd bring this back up since today we had IPs add two ships that were red-linked in a template but have no link outside the template. So far the information has not shown that these are many more then on the spot creations but one can hope I suppose. Personally I'm in favour of just removing these red links from ship templates and clearing up the wanted list. If for no reason other then it is the fastest and the easiest way to deal with this issue. Way back when we did have a starship placeholder template for ship's named Enterprise, which just said, "The Enterprise-blah was the blah numbered ship to be named Enterprise", filling up the letters between the E-O to the E-Z or whatever and in my view that was extremely pointless. It was also annoying that you had links to these articles and you think, "that sounds interesting!", and all you get is a generic message about nothing. Based on that my view on placeholders in a negative one and I think they would be detrimental to the surfing enjoyment of visitors. – 17:41, 17 April 2009 (UTC) :The Mediawiki 1.14 changes have put me in a red-link clearing mood and would be happy to start clearing red links from starship templates over the next few days. – 08:43, 30 April 2009 (UTC)